Whether you’re a bedroom producer who’s converted your walk-in closet to a recording studio or a seasoned pro who makes a living recording eight-piece ska bands, the last thing you want to worry about is how to keep your tracks and channel strips organized in your Logic Pro X session.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to work smarter and faster in Logic Pro X by keeping everything more organized, so you’ll know how to set up your sessions for success. Feel free to print this out and tape it to the studio control room door (we are not responsible for any tape residue left behind!).

Setting Up Your Logic Pro X Session

When you’re ready to go, and this includes untangling your monitor headphones and keeping your coffee away from your expensive guitar, launch Logic Pro X and click File > New. You can make a new Logic Pro X session from a template, but for our purposes, we’ll stick with making a session from scratch. Setting up a project with Spatial Audio will be a little different, if you’re working with that.

Choose A Project

Saving Logic Sessions as Folders or Packages

When you save your new Logic session for the first time, you have the option of saving it as a package or a folder. If you’re not sure what this means, the Apple Support site has a thorough explanation.

A package file contains all your Logic session information. If you’re sending Logic Pro X sessions to another studio or engineer, package files make it easier to share everything.

However, if you’re backing up to some cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox, the Logic session file extension will not be recognized. In this case, you might be better off saving the session in a folder. You’ll still have the LOGICX file extension for the session file, but your audio files, bounces, and samples will all be saved separately, which makes it easier to rebuild the session if something happens to the original file.

Saving as a package or folder

Track Organization

There are a lot of ways to sort your tracks so that even if you end up tracking 48 different opera singers for a five-song EP, for example, you’ll still be able to see what you’re doing.

Hiding Tracks

Sometimes you just want to focus on a few tracks at a time, or maybe you want to hide tracks you’ve already edited. Visually, it’s a great way to save space, especially if you’re working on a laptop without an external display.

There are a few ways to hide tracks:

  • Control-click on the track you want to hide and click Hide Selected Track(s).
  • Select a track, then go to the Track menu and click Hide Selected Track(s).
  • Use the keyboard shortcut Control + H to hide selected tracks.

When the H on the top of the Tracks area on the left-hand side is orange, that means you will not see your hidden tracks. If you click the H to make it green, you’ll be able to see your hidden tracks. They’ll all have a green H next to them in their track headers.

Keep in mind that this option is only available if Enable Complete Features is selected in Logic Pro > Preferences > Advanced. Lastly, remember that hidden tracks will not be muted by default, so you’ll have to mute them if you don’t want to hear them during playback.

How to hide tracks

Creating Track Stacks

You can group all your instruments or takes together by making track stacks. All the tracks in each track stack get bussed to the same stereo outputs, so you can solo the entire track stack. This allows you to hear everything together and to apply the same effect to every track in the track stack (say that 10 times fast!). If you decide later that you want to bus your tracks differently or use different effects, you can always select Flatten Track Stack to put the tracks back to normal.

track stacks

Track Header Components

The Track Header Components view has some useful options to organize your tracks and save CPU usage when recording and monitoring, such as:

  • Freeze: Disables all plugins and saves on CPU usage.
  • On/Off: Disables plugins and playback of the track, saving on CPU usage.
  • Solo and Mute: Both allow you to hear or mute each selected track individually.
  • Track Alternatives: Let you record several ideas and go back and forth between them.
track header components

Channel Strips

Back in the day, if you were working on a mixing console in a recording studio and wanted to remember exactly how you set each fader and knob on each channel of the console, you’d have to either write it down, take a picture, or create a recall sheet that shows all your settings.

Nowadays, in Logic Pro X you can use saved channel strip settings to instantly pull up the same plugins you used for the drums on one song, for example, and apply them to the next song. This way all your plugins will appear in the same order across multiple tracks, so it’ll be visually easier to keep track of any changes you make per track.

Saving Channel Strip Settings

save channel strip setting

In the Channel Strip view on the left, if you click on Setting, you’ll see an option to save your channel strip settings, among others. Below that, you’ll see any previously saved settings. If you click on one of those settings to load it, all the previous effects will be applied to the current channel. It will not change any of your routing or panning.

Saving Performances

If you save your channel strip settings as a performance, you can give it a program change number, which can then be triggered by your MIDI controller keyboard as a program change, which is useful for live performance applications or having more creative control over your instrument tracks.

For example, if you wanted to trigger a snare track with a particular channel setting as part of a live backing track, click on Setting in the Channel Strip view and then choose Save As Performance. A dialogue box will pop up where you can name the program and give it a program change number.

Once you save your channel strip performances, you’ll see them in that same Setting popup menu. Since channel strip performances can be changed with your MIDI controller keyboard, this also lets you switch performances during playback by simply pressing a key.

channel strip performance

Copying Channel Strip Settings

If you don’t want to save your settings to use in other projects but just want to quickly copy the plugins from one channel strip to the next, you can choose Copy Channel Strip Settings instead, and then Paste Plugins Only. This comes in handy when you’re using the same plugins between instrument tracks and audio tracks.

Audio Regions

Lastly, let’s take a look at a couple of ways to make your audio regions easier to see and edit.

Bouncing in Place

Bouncing an audio or instrument track in place renders the track with its effects or instruments, as well as its routing. Bouncing tracks saves CPU usage because it will apply any plugins used and convert all your MIDI tracks to audio. You can either leave, mute, or delete the original track. It also helps you organize your tracks by consolidating multiple audio regions and hiding tracks once they’ve been bounced.

To bounce one or more tracks, select the tracks and go to File > Bounce > Track in Place. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Control + Cmd + B.

bounce track in place

You can bounce audio regions on each track, which is useful if you have several audio regions you want to consolidate. Highlight the regions you want to bounce, Control-click, and then select Bounce and Join > Bounce in Place. The keyboard shortcut for bouncing audio regions in place is Control + B.

bounce audio regions in place

Renaming Regions

By default, Logic names each audio region according to the track name and the take, which is not very memorable and can get confusing very fast.

To make your life easier when you’re trying to find the best snare drum sound (an endless uphill battle), Control-click on the region and then go to Name and Color > Rename Regions. Give it a name other than “sounds like the St. Anger snare take 5 version 3 new” and you’re good to go.

rename regions

Backing Up Your Data and Best Practices

There’s just one more thing, and then you can go into the studio and make music. No matter what your experience level, it bears repeating: don’t forget to back up your data, ideally in multiple locations. For example, you can set up an external drive to use Time Machine and also sign up for a cloud-based storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Don’t forget about iCloud, especially if you have more than one Apple device, since you can access iCloud files from any device.

Lastly, keep in mind that if you’re new to making music with Logic Pro X, it’s best to spend some time getting familiar with the basics and making sure your Mac is set up the way you want it to be. Ultimately, everyone has their own way of working in Logic Pro X depending on what type of music they make. Over time, you’ll figure out a workflow that works for you.